- Seed Hunter visits genebank. Not many people hurt.
- I’d like to visit this Corn Palace.
- Rice domestication: not once, not twice, three times. Well, really, who’s to say maybe even more than that? Maybe even in Australia?
- Solomon Islands cacao wins award. Looking forward to tasting it one day. But is it certified?
- Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Giveaway.
- Researchers hoping to science the shit out of threat to Thanksgiving.
- Genetic resources and gastronomy in Brazil.
- Pineapple gets a genome.
- Sunflower saves soybean? What wizardry is this?
Brainfood: Wild maize, Elderberry phenolics, Barley & boron, Land sparing trifecta, Sustainable diets, Chinese apple diversity, Turkish okra diversity, Barcoding yams, Plant diversity levels, Biotic velocity
- Presence of Zea luxurians (Durieu and Ascherson) Bird in Southern Brazil: Implications for the Conservation of Wild Relatives of Maize. Well there’s a turnup for the books.
- Fruit Phenolic Composition of Different Elderberry Species and Hybrids. Some interspecific hybrids have high phenolics levels.
- Diversity in boron toxicity tolerance of Australian barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) genotypes. There’s variation beyond the 4 known boron tolerance loci.
- Agriculture and the threat to biodiversity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Intensification is good for biodiversity, but not yet.
- Land for Food & Land for Nature? The former, according to modelling. But it depends. See above.
- Wildlife-friendly farming increases crop yield: evidence for ecological intensification. Trifecta!
- Is a Cardio-Protective Diet Sustainable? A Review of the Synergies and Tensions Between Foods That Promote the Health of the Heart and the Planet. Yes, but it will take some work.
- Genetic diversity of Malus cultivars and wild relatives in the Chinese National Repository of Apple Germplasm Resources. The varieties from the former Soviet republics and Japan are different to each other and to the canonical European/North American/Chinese material.
- Genetic and phenotypic variation of Turkish Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L. Moench) accessions and their possible relationship with American, Indian and African germplasms. Turkish okra comes from all over the place.
- DNA barcoding of the main cultivated yams and selected wild species in the genus Dioscorea. 16/21 species I guess is a start.
- Plant responses to climatic extremes: within-species variation equals among-species variation. For a bunch of European grassland plants, within species variation in response to climate was as high as that among species.
- Biotic and Climatic Velocity Identify Contrasting Areas of Vulnerability to Climate Change. Tropical species can’t move fast enough.
Nibbles: EATx Cali, Gourds, Armenian wine, Wheat chemistry, Genomics of domestication, Soybean breeding
- Svalbard among things being discussed at EATx Cali today. Who knows, maybe other genebanks too?
- The cucumber’s wilder relatives.
- Armenian wine going back to the future.
- Whole grains deconstructed.
- Unpicking domestication in chickens and cattle. And the original paper on the latter, featuring the aurochs genome.
- Breeders have bred omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) out of soybeans, but are now going back to wild relatives to breed it back in.
That New Yorker story on heirlooms and Luther Burbank
On Friday Luigi nibbled the New Yorker’s recent story What Comes After Heirloom Seeds?, singling out Luther Burbank rather than the more contentious issue of where plant breeding is headed. The New Yorker’s fact-checking is legendary, at least among a certain demographic, in which I number myself. So I want to draw attention to a single punctuation mark, which in my view is imbued with as much snidery as a punctuation mark can be.
Burbank’s prolificacy grew out of a creativity that could seem almost shameless. He was willing to cross just about anything that had leaves: a plum with an apricot (originally a plumcot, now a pluot); a tomato with a potato (a worthless novelty); a blackberry with an apple (no clue); a peach with an almond (!). Burbank’s theoretical validation came from Charles Darwin and his 1876 survey, “The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,” which Burbank seems to have mistaken for a how-to manual. He called himself an “evoluter” of plants.
Can you spot it? Yup, it’s that exclamation mark after the peach X almond cross. At first, I took the whole paragraph to be an expression of the author wilfully showing off his ignorance. After all, the examples seem like pretty obvious crosses to me. So I did a little cursory fact-checking of my own. Seems he’s a gardener. No, wait, he writes about gardening; not the same thing at all.
Why the surprise at peach X almond then? Blowed if I know. So I’ll just science it to death.
Section Amygdalus and section Persicae are closer [to] each other than to any other sections.
What that means is that the peach and the almond were probably the most closely related of the crosses Burbank made, and thus probably the easiest and the least worthy of notice.
The quote is from Phylogeny and Classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae), by Shuo Shi, Jinlu Li, Jiahui Sun, Jing Yu and Shiliang Zhou, published in the Journal of Integrative Biology (2013) 55: 1069–1079. ((Shi S, Li J, Sun J, Yu J, & Zhou S (2013). Phylogeny and classification of Prunus sensu lato (Rosaceae). Journal of integrative plant biology, 55 (11), 1069-1079 PMID: 23945216))
I’m surprised the New Yorker wasn’t aware of it.
Nibbles: German zucchini, Nice tomatoes, Genebank Database Hell, Pakistan genebank, Brachiaria genomics, Haiti agriculture, Chinese potatoes, Green green grass of home, Domestication book, Rudisha returns!
- Deadly zucchini sweep through Germany. Actually just one possible hybrid with ornamental squash, apparently, probably, I’m told by a vegetables expert.
- Everybody loves photos of heirloom tomatoes.
- Sorting out genebank data management at IRRI.
- It’s very tricky to move the Pakistan national genebank.
- Where are the Al-resistance genes in Brachiaria?
- Le jardin créole in Haiti as a model of sustainable agriculture.
- China’s spud revolution. And more.
- Grass is America’s biggest crop. Tell me something I don’t know. What’s that you say? Not that kind of grass?
- Nice excerpt on cats from recent book on domestication by Richard C. Francis.
- The plant-based diets of East African long-distance runners.